Bee Brainy
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| HIVE of information ... bee being fed as part of QBI experiments. Photo: Stewart Gould |
Families flocked to see the latest animated hit, Bee Movie, but scientists from the University’s Queensland Brain Institute have long embraced the bee for very different reasons.
Bees have a brain the size of a sesame seed but they are proving to be a model species to study for their smart “minds”, their amazing capacity to learn and remember things and for their astute senses of smell and vision. “Bees are the Rolls Royce of the insect world due to their amazing brain,” Dr Charles Claudianos, from QBI’s Visual and Sensory Neuroscience Group, said.
The group is studying how the bee’s brain works and how bees behave, fly, navigate, see and smell. They have discovered bees use only a handful of key compounds to discern between floral scents, which, like a perfume, can contain more than 100 different odorants.
QBI Senior Research Fellow, Dr Judith Reinhard, said bees’ “noses” were their antennae, which carried countless odour receptors to detect even the smallest scent molecule in the air. Dr Reinhard said a bee’s sense of smell was so precise it could distinguish between hundreds of different aromas and also tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar, by sniffing its scent from metres away.
The University team is working with the CSIRO to uncover how insects, such as the honeybee, learn and process scents to develop more sensitive electronic noses. Electronic noses have been used for many years in industries such as wine, fragrances, food and beverages, pest control and animal production.
Scientists from the 17-strong University group, led by Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science as well as UQ and the QBI, have proved that bees and humans share up to 30 percent of the same genes, including many genes involved in brain function.
QBI Senior Research Fellow, Dr Claudianos, has found the same molecules that cause autism in humans are also involved with memory formation in bees. Dr Claudianos said the bee brain was quite sophisticated for its size, but that it needed constant sensory input and stimulation to develop properly – similar to the human brain.
The research group is continuing to test and apply bee technology to unmanned aerial vehicles, which, like bees, can navigate and control their speeds based on how quickly the vehicle passes objects on the fly. The UQ group’s research focuses on the common honey bee from Europe. They keep several hives at UQ St Lucia for research, with between 10,000 and 20,000 bees in each.
D I D YO U K N O W ?
• Bees have lived on our planet for about 25 million years.
• Bee brains are oval, about 20 times bigger than the brain of a fruit fly.
• Bees’ legs have knees, ankles and feet.
• Bees must visit thousands of flowers to produce just a kilogram of honey.
Story author: Miguel Holland
FUNDING: CSIRO Flagship Collaborative Research Cluster Fund
- RESEARCHERS: Dr Charles Claudianos, Dr Judith Reinhard and Professor Mandyam Srinivasan
- EMAIL: c.claudianos@uq.edu.au
- WEB: www.qbi.uq.edu.au
